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A waste of good cake

Despite the fact that I can’t eat the majority of cakes now, I still collect cake recipes like a mad woman as I do still bake (half of my recipes board on Pinterest is cake related). Other people just benefit from the sugary goodness and my waistline benefits from me not eating it.

But there is a type of cake which I don’t like and despite it being the it cake of the moment, I don’t really see the point of.

I have only had it once and that was a cupcake from none other than the Hummingbird Bakery so it should have been the best going but it was a bit dry (which might have been the baking) and tasted like food colouring. Yep, you could taste the colouring in there. Not pleasant. And this is the big reason I don’t do red velvet cake. Because the modern recipe has corrupted what was a traditional recipe from America’s deep South where the red the name refers to came from a reaction between the cocoa and the buttermilk the cake contained. Whilst even the most authentic recipes contained colouring it wasn’t in the quantities that are used now. Whilst this is partly due to a change in the processing of cocoa (I’m not going to get into the science of it) which makes the red tinge more pronounced, as time has gone by people have got more and more fixated on the ‘red’ part of red velvet cake rather than the cake itself.

We do not need red velvet pancakes, brownies, cheesecake or anything else and we certainly don’t need blue velvet cake (the idea makes my head hurt). And if you really want red velvet cake, then do the best thing for your body and make chocolate beetroot cake. At least that way you can claim to have had a vegetable portion with your pudding.

Are you a red velvet cake fan? Or do you prefer your cake minus the massive amounts of colouring?